Hey, welcome back to a brand new episode of ICOJudge, brought to you by me, Mihai Catalin Teodosiu, your favorite programmer, entrepreneur, and cryptocurrency enthusiast [LinkedIn] andICOJudge.co, the best ICO and cryptocurrency assessment service in the world!

Full disclosure! The reviews I write on my blog are 100% independent from any ICO influence, being solely my own opinions about whether an ICO or existing coin is worth any investment on my behalf or not. As always, this is not financial advice, I am not a financial advisor!

Since my first cryptocurrency reviews, I have refined the reviewing process, keeping my 10 steps intact, but making the scoring system more granular. Each item in the list is assessed either as Great (1p), Good (0.75p), Bad (0.25p) or Missing (0p).

Finally, the total score for each ICO or existing coin is calculated as the average of the scores for each item in the list.

Also, a comments section is provided for each criterion, providing further insight, if necessary.

As a personal preference, I decided to invest only in ICOs or existing coins that score over 80% (On Track or Low Risk, according to my system), no matter what people say, no matter how great the hype is or any other kind of word-of-mouth thingy that gets noobs overly excited. Yes, I really do practice what I preach.

Their whitepaper (which they claim it is not a whitepaper) can be found at https://cdn.vechain.com/vechain_ico_ideas_of_development_en.pdf. Also, the whitepaper can be found by doing a Google search, instead of being included in a “Documentation” or “Resources” section of the website. Nevertheless, the whitepaper contains key areas (which some ICOs seem to miss, sometimes) like team members and advisors, financial planning, governance structure and so on. The document lacks a proper roadmap, but we do have it outlined in their medium post (link posted above). And it’s quite impressive: new major exchange, rebranding, new partnerships, masternodes. For this reason and the ones listed at the beginning of this section, I think they don’t deserve a full point for their (not a) whitepaper.

Finally, I must say that an official, well-designed and very detailed documentation/whitepaper (however you want to call it) should be a part of their website, in my opinion, at least after they will be done with the rebranding and first release of the product.

Item #2

Do I feel like this technology will solve an existing issue?

1

Comments

Yes, VeChain really aims to solve an existing issue.

According to their documentation, “The vision of VeChain is to build a trustfreeand distributed business ecosystem based on the Blockchaintechnology self-circulated and expanding.”.

Are there any founders / developers / special advisors with a solid background?

1

Comments

VeChain’s team is really, really (I mean really) impressive.

Go through the team by yourself and draw a conclusion:

The advisors are also strong. For instance, Bo Shen is already a big name in the cryptocurrency industry, being the General Partener of Fenbushi Capital and co-founder of ZCash, Qtum, BitShares and others. We also have the CEO (Nan Ning) and co-founder (Daniel Kelman) of BitOcean, a famous Japanese exchange, among the advisors of VEN / VET.

I keep saying VEN / VET because they are going to go through a huge rebranding process soon and their tokens will be converted to VET (VeChain Thor). Cool name, btw 🙂

Item #4

Is there a well-established and active community? (Slack, Telegram, Discord, Twitter and so on)

0.25

Comments

VeChain definitely needs more marketing and a larger community, to raise awareness and push the price up even more.

Their Facebook and LinkedIn profiles are quite weak at the moment, but they do have a rapidly growing community on Twitter (over 7.3k followers at the time of this writing) and Telegram (over 4.6k users).

There’s definitely room for improvement here and I’m convinced they will invest the effort into this as soon as their rebranding process will be completed.

Item #5

Is the current price low enough to believe in a future 100x return?

1

Comments

The current price of a VEN token is about $1.6 and it is at an all time high value. The price recently got a huge pump and it keeps rising steadily. They definitely need more volume and this volume will definitely increase once they will be listed on another major exchange, except Binance.

Will the price reach $160 at some point. It has the potential, as long as they keep working on the product and building more partnerships and as long as they keep their community engaged with the project.

As a side note. Do I see VeChain in the Top 10 on Coinmarketcap.com? Yes, I really do, BUT they need to really stick to their plan.

Item #6

How high is the circulating supply of coins?

1

Comments

There are 867,162,633 VEN tokens in total, with a current circulating supply of 277,162,633 tokens, which is a promising figure for such an amazing team and project.

Item #7

Are there any current or announced partnerships with big names in the industry?

1

Comments

VeChain is really one of the best projects in terms of partnerships. They have partnered with PwC and that is a HUGE thing (https://www.pwccn.com/en/press-room/press-releases/pr-150517.html). They are also working with Microsoft, Renault and rumors say BMW is on the list, as well. Also, they are going to officially announce a partnership with another giant: DNV GL, a $30B global quality assurance and risk management company.

Is there any existing product/prototype/alpha version for this technology?

1

Comments

Yes, “VeChain was designed in Q2 of 2015. Since then it has rolled out multiple smart contract templates and its VeChain smart chip, which will be used to track all products on the blockchain. The VeChain smart chip is essentially an NFC chip, RFID tracker or QR code that tracks whatever it is attached to and protects them from tampering, counterfeiting and ensures that their entire life cycle is stored securely on the blockchain. It essentially makes it easy to track, collect, and store data that otherwise had to be inputted manually with great difficulty.” (source: Reddit post – link above).

Now, VeChain is aiming to release ” VeChain 3rd generation smart chips. BaaS (Blockchain as a Service) Cloud platform launches” and that is soon to come (check out their use cases using the Solutions tab on their website – https://www.vechain.com/).

Item #9

Does the technology solve a particular issue or tries to be the jack of all trades? (not to be confused with Item #2. Here, it’s very important to me if the team tries to address a particular problem and do it well, rather than trying to build X apps and platforms all at once, which can be counterproductive, especially when having a small team or budget)

1

Comments

VeChain tries to solve a general issue for several different markets, like luxury goods, agriculture, auto or logistics. So, it seems they are focusing on creating a single technology that can be used across many domains and industries and that is a great approach. Also, their team is quite big and has a lot of potential, which enables us to trust that they’re gonna build this, no matter the obstacles. Furthermore, given that they already have a working (non-blockchain) product, a well-established name in the market and a huge pile of partnerships, really makes me be very optimistic about the success of this project.

Item #10

Does the Fibonacci retracement technique reveals a good entry point to buy right now?

0.75

Comments

I don’t even need to do a Fibonacci retracement at this point, because it’s obvious that VEN’s price just hit an all time high level in the last couple of days. Theoretically, this is not a great moment to invest in a coin, BUT considering that they announced a big exchange listing coming up this month, the release of masternodes on December 21st and new partnerships starting January, I think there’s a good chance the price will continue to dramatically increase over the next few months, at least. Then, once the number of partnerships has grown, the community has flourished and the platform gets its alphe/beta versions released, I see VEN/VET jumping in price even more. Again, this is just my personal opinion, NOT a financial advice.

For all the above reasons, I will give VEN 0.75p at this point, although, technically, the Fib retracement tool shows me the opposite.

PROJECT SCORE

8.75

Conclusion:

VeChain is an amazing medium/long-term investment, considering the team and advisors behind the project, the platform they’re preparing to launch and the current token metrics. Improvements should be made regarding the community and overall marketing.

I have invested in VEN tokens recently and I really do believe that this project is currently flying under the radar, but it has great growth potential in the medium-to-long term.